Literature: the counterbalance to state order

On a recent trip to the United States, I came across Reading Lolita in Tehran on a stand advertising the latest bestsellers and 'must reads.' The title provoked me to take a closer look but I felt suspicious about the book with its cover depicting two woman dressed in chadors, their eyes turned from the gaze of the viewer.

So I picked up the book with indifference and caution: in the months before the war in Iraq I had been struck by the number of articles in newspapers and magazines (Western) that focused on the brutality of Saddam Hussein and his family. These horror stories were part of the preparation for war, a means of legitimating the use of force, a necessary accompaniment to the drumbeat about weapons of mass destruction conjured up to spread fear throughout Europe and the United States. To be sure, such practices are not isolated to times of war, as Edward Said has noted in his writings on culture and imperialism, but serve as the cultural geography that map the colonial and post-colonial world: but in times of war these strategies of representation intensify as the Other comes under increasing scrutiny and interest.

At the same time, in the desire to promote the horror stories about Iraq there were few stories about the everyday life for people in Iraq: just as it is necessary to demonize those in power so it is necessary to remain distant from those who may become collateral damage, those whose lives can be 'valued' by the fact that 'we' may have to risk killing them in order to save them.

Was Reading Lolita in Tehran a cultural product designed to contribute to the architecture of fear being assembled -- an architecture that extends to our most deepest, visceral fears and nightmares through to complex policy documents and projections-- to prepare for a future war with Iran, a means of preparing the foreign policy agenda for the next stage in the Bush mission to deliver us from insecurity and terror?

Favourable reviews from writers such as Margaret Atwood pushed me beyond my initial prejudice and suspicion: that a review from a celebrated author from North America whose work has often explored formations of power should authorise and legitimate my purchasing of the book shows just how far the 'Orientalist' imaginary can permeate those who are aware of its dangers.

Reading Lolita in Tehran tells of the author's project to create a secret reading group to escape the disciplinary control the more orthodox of the ayatollahs had imposed that made the reading of certain books a dangerous and anti-revolutionary activity. Nafasi wants to show her students how literature has the power to evoke empathy for other human beings, as well as a spirit of questioning on the supposedly natural order of things: the authors that give the foundation for the reading group-- Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen--illuminate the complexity of being human, a complexity that the regime in Tehran was trying to erase in its pursuit of a perfectly ordered territory.

Commenting on the links between The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald) and Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) to the revolutionary era in Iran, Nafisi remarks on the obsession with dreams of power:

How can you impose them on a constantly changing, imperfect, incomplete reality? You would become a Humbert, destroying the object of your dream; or a Gatsby, destroying yourself.

Having not read all the books that are discussed in the secret reading group (a list that ranged from Nuha al--Radi's Baghdad Diaries to Fielding's Tom Jones to Huckleberry Finn to Mario Vargas Llosa's Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), I had thought that the book would become less interesting as it unfolded, too academic, too focused on the nuances of books I had not yet read. However, Nafasi's writerly skill, like the classes she teaches, shows us how literature can keep the imagination alive and help readers make sense of events that are unfolding -- often brutally -- around them.

Not only is the book an extended meditation on the power of reading and literature, but its departures into the story of Nafisi and Iran--a story inseparable in its depiction of the intimate connections between the public and the private-- that weave their way through the book give those of us ignorant of Iranian history a useful introduction. And her story-- and those of her students-- makes the book a compelling journey in its own right.

So the book is to be recommended not only to those with an interest in literature but for those readers interested in the micro-politics of power in a society where the imagination is seen as dangerous. And like Salam Pax's The Baghdad Blog, Reading Lolita in Tehran gives the reader, specially the Western reader, some proximity to those who appear to us as spectres and statistics in the digital spectacles of wars presented '24/7'on our television screens.

Mark J. Lacy teaches international politics at Lancaster University, U.K.